Voice Search is spreading everywhere on the globe. People are now getting used to getting their tasks done just by speaking commands.
We can sometimes ignore the futuristic thinking about voice search, like,
- 50% of searches will be Voice-Based in 2020.
- 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022.
- According to Google, 20% of all searches are Voice-based.
- 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice tech at least once a week.
- Almost 20% of all voice search queries are triggered by just 25 keywords.
But if we see the Indian context, what would you think about it?
What is Voice Search?
Voice search is the technology that interprets our voice samples into understandable queries. By using this technology, we can easily search for anything just by speaking, without having to press any keys. Google Assistance, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa are the tech giant in this field.
Indian User-base for Voice Search
No doubt, voice is the future of the Internet. Indian market is also similar to the world market if we have a glance at stats.In fact, at this time, 22% of searched are voice-based in India according to stats & the speed is increasing with the rate of 36% (source: internet)
The main thing to look here is how acceptable our audience is? These types of big changes are mostly done by a full generation.
If our generation can adopt this new technique, then it's clear that the voice search market is not so far.
And that's exactly is the case. India has 65% of its population under 35. India is a country of young people, who can easily adopt new technology if it is helping them live a better life.
This is a big number and at this time, we just can't ignore this. The only way to survive more on the internet is to optimize our content, websites, pages for voice search.
The twist is, it looks very complex. Still, we are fighting for traditional SEO, which we are doing at this time, how can we do that for voice search?
How to Optimize our Content for Voice Search
As a Content Writer, I have to be updated with the latest SEO and search guidelines. Because this is one of the two things, which make a content writer different from the crowd (the other one is our voice and thought process).And what I found about SEO is that the user is the target of SEO. We are struggling to target SEO, which can then target users. Why can't we directly target our users?
And that's the basics of Voice Search. We have to write our content in the same way, as we think and discuss it with our friends. feature a question in your content and then provide a brief answer right there.
Keywords for Voice Search
Keywords have always been the most valuable thing in SEO. In a voice search, keywords might gonna change.Because people don't write the full question to get the solution. Just take yourself as an example, do you write the full question on Google to search something? That's why the keywords which we are targeting don't follow grammar rules.
But while speaking, we don't find any difficulty speaking the full question. If I have to search for something on Google, I'll just speak the full line which comes in my mind to search on Google Assistance, Siri, or Alexa and this includes Grammer!
It's Time to get back to Grammer!
We should now be aware of voice grammar which we use in our daily talking. Now we should not cut out that is, are, too, etc.Other than Grammar, I strongly believe that punctuation is also now important for SEO. In fact, every basic tense and language tips are now important which we were taught in our schools.
And as Google itself is getting better and better with time. You must have heard of recent BERT update, which now understands user language better.
So my advice for SEO is as simple as focus on your users. Google wants them, they want our content. So make content for them, Google will be pleased to feature it.
